SAXON,
THINK NOT
ALL
IS WONFelicia Hemans and the Making of BritonsJane Aaron

I

‘Few poetic careers can have been more thoroughly devoted
to the
construction of national identity than was that of Felicia Hemans’s, writes
Tricia Lootens, in her contribution to Angela Leighton’s Victorian
Women Poets: A Critical Reader (1996). For the majority of Hemans’s
twentieth-century readers, there is no question as to which nation was
the object of Hemans’s constructive patriotism: of course it was that
nation eulogised in such poems as ‘The Homes of England’. There are few
more passionately jingoistic poems in the English language than Hemans’s
‘The Name of England’, for example:

The trumpet of the battle
Hath a high and thrilling tone;

And the first deep gun of an ocean-fight
Dread music all its own.

But a mightier power, my England!
Is in that name of thine,

To strike the fire from every heart
Along the banner’d line.
* * * * *
A thousand ancient mountains
Its pealing note hath stirr’d,—

Sound on, and on, for evermore,
O thou victorious word![1]

And yet, merely a glance at the contents pages of a ‘Complete’
Hemans shows that the poet was equally capable of empathising with the
ancient mountains of her own isle as they ‘stirred’ to the pealing note
of an anti-English patriotic war cry. In poems such as ‘Chant of the Bards
before Their Massacre by Edward I’ and ‘Owen Glyndwr’s War-Song’, the
poetic voice takes up arms on behalf of the Welsh nation, in its struggles
against its thirteenth-century conquerors and its later rebellions against
English rule.

When Hemans’s Welsh patriotic
verses were published in the 1821 volume Welsh Melodies, she was
hailed by her contemporary Welsh audience as a ‘poet for Wales’, and made
an honorary member of the Royal Cambrian Institution in acknowledgement
of her role as a popularizer of Welsh national identity. By birth of mixed
Irish, Italian and German ancestry, Hemans appears to have been gratified
by this reception. According to her own testimony she regarded herself
as a naturalised Welsh woman, having resided in north Wales since 1800,
when her father’s failed business necessitated a family retreat from Liverpool
to Abergele in Denbighshire: Felicia Browne, as she then was, was seven
years old at the time. Cefn yr Ogof Pass, which loomed up immediately
behind the Brownes’ new home, for centuries was a key battle site between
the princes of Gwynedd in their strongholds in Aberffraw and Dolbadarn
to the west and the invading armies of the Saxon, Norman and Plantagenet
kings of England, coming over Offa’s Dyke to the east. According to the
nineteenth-century Welsh historian Jane Williams, ‘no spot in the Principality
has been more thoroughly saturated with blood’.[2] This spot was Hemans’s
‘scene of writing’ from 1800 to 1828, during which years she composed
by far the major part of her oeuvre. At the time of the Browne family’s
arrival in Abergele, a revival of antiquarian interest in Celtic history,
led in Wales by the recently established societies of the Cymmrodorion
and Gwyneddigion, promoted a local enthusiasm for the old battle sites
and their histories, in which Felicia, as a young woman, seems to have
participated. As some of her verses in Welsh Melodies are translations
from Welsh-language originals, it would appear that she could also at
least read, if not speak, Welsh.

In 1822, Hemans composed and
delivered in person a poetical address for the annual Welsh Eisteddfod
in which she publicly presented herself as working within the Welsh bardic
tradition. The poem eulogises the Welsh bards of old as inspired by their
historic freedom-fighters:

Well might bold freedom’s soul pervade the strains
Which startled eagles from their lone domains,
And like a breeze in chainless triumph went
Up through the blue resounding firmament.
Whence came the echoes to those numbers high?
’Twas from the battle-fields of days gone by,
And from the tombs of heroes laid to rest
With their good swords, upon the mountain’s breast.

Nor are their latter-day counterparts, in whose ranks Hemansthrough
her use of the first-person plural pronounhere firmly includes herself,
wanting in Welsh ‘patriot-feeling’:

Land of the bard! our spirit flies to thee!
To thee our thoughts, our hopes, our hearts belong,
Our dreams are haunted by thy voice of song!
Nor yield our souls one patriot-feeling less
To the green memory of thy loveliness
Than theirs, whose harp-notes peal’d from every height,In the sun’s face, beneath the eye of light![3]

But it is not the Welsh, or
even the British, dead who are eulogized in the poemalso published
in 1822which immediately precedes ‘The Meeting of the Bards’ in
nineteenth-century editions of Hemans’s poetry. In ‘England’s Dead’, while
ostensibly mourning those who fell in Britain’s eighteenth-century imperial
wars and its more recent engagements with Napoleon, Hemans also by implication
glories in the world-wide expansion of English dominion:

Poems like ‘England’s Dead’ established Hemans’s reputation,
and accounted for both her immediate and subsequent extensive popularity
during the nineteenth century, not only in Britain but in its most far-flung
colonial settlements. But the fact that Hemans’s Welsh patriotic poems
by no means gained the same degree of international prominence in later
Victorian culture as did her English nationalist verse is, of course,
in part the consequence of the vast difference in terms of influence and
power between the two nations at that time, and should not blind her late
twentieth-century readers to the paradoxes in her position. Is it possible
to be the national poet of two nations at once, particularly given a scenario
in which the existence of one of the nations in question can only be constructed
at the cost of deconstructing the ‘greatness’ of the other? Not insubstantial
numbers of England’s military dead, albeit of an earlier date, rested
beneath Hemans’s own back doorstep in Abergele, but, in the poems in which
she evokes the battles in which they died, it is to their opponents that
she accords her moral appropriation and patriotic fealty. In this paper,
I intend to explore this apparent contradiction further, not only in relation
to Hemans’s own writings, but also in terms of its significance for the
construction of early nineteenth-century Britishas opposed to either
Welsh or Englishidentity.

Hemans’s Welsh patriotic poems
belong to one very specific period in her history and that of Britain:
they were composed during the years immediately following the final defeat
of Napoleon at Waterloo. Although she wrote a few scattered incidental
poems with Welsh settings both before and after the years 1815 to 1822,
they are local rather than national poems, expressive of the warmth of
her feelings only for her immediate home environment and community rather
than for Wales as a nation or for the Welsh as a race. According to Linda
Colley, in her seminal study Britons: Forging a Nation 1707–1837,
the years which immediately succeeded Waterloo constituted something of
a crisis point in terms of British identity. ‘There was,’ Colley says,
‘a profound loss of direction involved … How was Britishness to be defined
now that it could no longer rely so absolutely on a sense of beleaguered
Protestantism and on regular conflict with the Other in the shape of Catholic
France?’[4] Colley sees Britain as an invented nation, superimposedduring
the century which followed the Act of Union with Scotlandonto much
older English, Scottish and Welsh alignments and loyalties, and one which
was forged above all by war with France; Britons, she says, defined themselves
as Protestants struggling for survival against the world’s foremost Catholic
power. During the 1790s and early 1800s, British militarism could convincingly
be represented as pre-eminently defensive, as intent on resisting aggressive
French imperialist encroachments on both its own national liberty and
that of its weaker European neighbours: it was not, after all, until 1805
that Napoleon was finally forced to abandon his plans to invade Britain.
Felicia Browne, at the age of fourteen, had made her poetic debut with
a paean in praise of Britain as a pre-eminent world freedom-fighter. In
her ‘England and Spain, or Valour and Patriotism’, published in 1808,
Freedom is personified as the local deity of the British Isles (or rather
‘Isle’):

The desecrator of the goddess Freedom is of course the ‘Despot
of France! destroyer of mankind!’ who in 1808 continued to challenge the
forces of Liberty through his attempts to annex Spain. ‘Wouldst thou yet
by added crimes provoke / The bolt of heaven to launch the fatal stroke?’
the young Felicia asks of Bonaparte?

Bereave a nation of its rights revered,
Of all to mortals sacred and endear’d?
And shall they tamely liberty resign,
The soul of life, the source of bliss divine?
* * * * *
No, tyrant! no! Thy utmost force is vain
The patriot-arm of freedom to restrain.

The poem describes how, as the handmaiden of the goddess
Liberty, the British army under Arthur Wellesley issued forth to join
forces with the guerrilla fighters of Spain and Portugal and wage the
Peninsular Wars against France. It hails the heroism of Spain’s valiant
British rescuers with a patriotic fervour which was no doubt heightened
by the fact that two of Felicia’s brothers served in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers,
and at least one of them was fighting in Spain at the time the poem was
composed:

Ye sons of Albion! first in danger’s field,
The sword of Britain and of truth to wield! …
The reign of Freedom let your arms restore,
And bid oppression fallto rise no more!

But ‘England and Spain’ is
not a poem which glorifies war as such, as opposed to necessary wars in
defence of Liberty: it closes with an eulogy to the ‘sweet Peace’ which
will return once ‘mad ambition has ceased to rage’, and Napoleon has finally
been taught his lesson. The ‘demon-breath’ of war will be assuaged when
‘the despot’s dread career is closed, / And might restrain’d and tyranny
deposed!’ (pp. 6 and 9). After 1815, however, the problem for both Hemans
on a personal and familial level, and for Britain’s image on an international
level, was that although Napoleon’s ‘mad ambition’ duly ended with his
final surrender, neither Britain, nor the Browne brothers, nor the infantry
captain Felicia had married in 1812, did in fact lay down their arms.
On the contrary, the Waterloo period, and the years immediately following
Napoleon’s downfall, saw Britain annexing territories and conquering kingdoms
with as much avid imperialist greed as the French ‘tyrant’ had shown at
his most despotic. The Ascension Island, British Guiana, the Ionian Islands,
Malta, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Trinidad, Tristan da Cunha, Tobago,
and other territories ostensibly ‘freed’ from Dutch or French rule during
the Napoleonic wars were annexed to the British Empire in the settlements
of 1814 and 1815. The Cape of Good Hope became a British colony in 1814;
the King of Kandy was deposed and Ceylon taken in 1815; the Himalayan
kingdom of Nepal conquered in 1816; Singapore taken in 1819; Gambia and
the Gold Coast placed under the British Crown in 1821; the Burmese kings
conquered in a series of engagements which began in 1824; and Western
Australia, Queensland and Tasmania established as British territories
in 1824–6. These military engagements, bloody and long-lasting as many
of them were, were not easily construable as fought in the name of Britain’s,
or any other nation’s, freedom. And yet Felicia, as much as her brothers
and husband, had founded a public career on her role as upholder and popularizer
of Britain’s image as the heroic defender of smaller nations’ liberties
against the greed and aggression of more powerful states.

Apart from the references
in the poem ‘England’s Dead’ to far-flung English corpses, Felicia Hemans
wrote few verses either in praise or disapprobation of these aggressively
imperial British engagements. And yet during the years 1815 to 1821 she
continued to compose poems with a markedly militaristic theme. But her
concern now was with the history of a very different epoch in which Britons,
albeit of a more Ancient variety, could still plausibly enough be presented
as fighting for freedom. In 1819 she won a Scottish prize poem competition
on the subject of William Wallace’s invocation to Bruce to take up arms
against the English, and two years later published her volume Welsh
Melodies. That these works not only operated to preserve the concept
of British heroes as freedom fighters but also, ironically enough at one
level, aided in the construction of a British, as opposed to an English,
Scottish or Welsh, identity, is suggested by one of the reviewers of her
‘Wallace’s Invocation to Bruce’:

That a Scottish prize, for
a poem on a subject purely, proudly Scottish, has been adjudged to an
English candidate demonstrates the disappearance of those jealousies
which, not a hundred years ago, would have denied such a candidate any
thing like a fair chance with a native … We delight in every gleam of
high feeling which warms the two nations alike, and ripens yet more that
confidence and sympathy which bind them together in one great family.[5]

Binding together the English, Welsh and Scots in one great
fighting family would appear to be part of the purpose of Hemans’s Scottish
and Welsh verses. They frequently work to suggest that the Welsh and Scots
should not forget their historical fighting prowess, but should resurrect
and exercise it in the interests of present-day Britannia. In ‘The Fair
Isle’ from Welsh Melodies, for example, the native Britons are
rallied in defeat after the coming of the Anglo–Saxons by a bardic voice
which prophesies their final triumph:

Sons of the Fair Isle! forget not the time
Ere spoilers had breathed the free air of your clime …
Ages may roll ere your children regain
The land for which heroes have perish’d in vain;
Yet, in the sound of your names shall be power,
Around her still gathering in glory’s full hour.
Strong in the fame of the mighty that sleep,
Your Britain shall sit on the throne of the deep. (p. 152)

In so far as the last line quoted above means anything at
all, it presumably refers to that British naval supremacy which was the
primary cause of Napoleon’s downfall. The poet, then, speaking as a prophet,
appears to be exhorting Britain’s aboriginal tribes to take an active
pride in its future nineteenth-century imperial triumphs, and to see them
as redeeming their lost honour and liberties. Both the Scots and the Welsh
are pre-eminently interpolated as heroic freedom-fighters in Hemans’s
verse of this period.

Another unifying device, used
by Hemans in both ‘Wallace’s Invocation to Bruce’ and Welsh Melodies,
is her frequent reference to those battles in which Britain’s early freedom
fighters successfullyaccording to Hemansvanquished an earlier
southern European imperial invading army, the Romans this time rather
than the French. That the Romans left Britain because Rome was threatened
by the Goths rather than because they had not entirely subjugated Britain’s
Northern and Western fringes is ignored in these poems, and Ancient British
valour stressed. Wallace after his defeat mourns that,

Shrouded in Scotland’s blood-stain’d plaid,
Low are her mountain-warriors laid;
They fell, on that proud soil whose mould
Was blent with heroes’ dust of old,
And, guarded by the free and brave,
Yielded the Romanbut a grave! (p. 64)

And in Welsh Melodies Caswallon, a king of the Ancient
Britons jeers after the departing Romans, ‘Lords of earth! to Rome returning,
/ Tell how Britain combat wages!’ (‘Caswallon’s Triumph’, p. 150)

The Romans, like the French,
constituted an unproblematic ‘Other’ against which ‘Britain’ could readily
be represented as united. But the entry of the Anglo–Saxon into this happy
British fighting family required more delicate negotiation. In the Welsh
poems this negotiation is accomplished through a very particular use of
racial terminology: a splitting of the sign ‘Anglo–Saxon’, in which Hemans
is aided by the fact that the Welsh and Gaelic terms for the English as
a race‘Saeson’ and ‘Sassenach’derive from the name of the
Saxon– rather than the Anglo–Germanic tribe. For Hemans in these poems
it is not a matter of the Welsh versus the English but of ‘Cambrians’
or ‘Britons’ versus ‘Saxons’ only. In ‘The Dying Bard’s Prophecy’ for
example, a Welsh bard, after Edward I’s final defeat of the last native
Welsh prince in 1282, interpolates the enemy as Saxon, rather than as
Anglo–Norman or English. With his last breath the bard proclaims:

‘Saxon, think not all is won. …
Dreamer! that numberest with the dead
The burning spirit of the mountain-land!
…
Think’st thou, because the song hath ceased,
The soul of song is fled?’ (p. 152)

Here the ‘Saxon’ features as a brute materialist, unmindful
of the power of poetry and the resistant spirit of the freedom fighter
mystically united with his land, but the ‘Angles’ are not necessarily
implicated in his disgrace. Even as late as 1400 to 1415, during the period
of Owain Glyndwr’s ill-fated rebellion, the Cambrians are still only fighting
the Saxons in Hemans’s poetry, although by then it would appear a gross
historical inaccuracy to designate their enemy as anything other than
English. ‘A sound is on the breeze,’ says the doomed but still resistant
Owain, ‘A murmur as of swelling seas! / The Saxon on his way!’ (p. 149).
In the interest of constructing the image of the Britons as a united family
of liberty-lovers, Hemans appears ready to sacrifice that lower-ranking,
and not even Christian, churl, the Saxon, but ‘the name of England’ must
not be defiled.

Nor did the historical heroes
of Catholic Ireland find inclusion in Hemans’s Great British fighting
family. Irish freedom fighters are not registered in her roll-call of
the great, which with hindsight was just as well, given that, after she
finally left Wales in 1828, Hemans was to spend her last years in the
Dublin residence of her brother Lieutenant-Colonel George Browne, the
then British Commissioner of Police in Ireland. As her brother was tasked
with the repression and policing of any incipient contemporary uprisings
against the British Crown in Ireland, it would have been curious, to say
the least, had family loyalties compelled him to welcome to his home one
who had espoused in her verse the cause of those rebels’ predecessors.
But Hemans’s ‘Fair Isle’ is always singular, a Britannia without Ireland,
and a Britannia which, moreover, after 1821, with British unity and its
global supremacy apparently secularly established, she reverts to calling
simply ‘England’.

NOTES

Felicia Hemans, ‘The Name of England’, Poems of Felicia
Hemans (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1852), p. 567. All subsequent
references to Hemans’ poetry are taken from this edition.

The Sister’s Budget: A Collection of Original Tales in Prose and Verse;
in Two Volumes. By the Authors of “The Odd Volume,” &c. With Contributions
from Mrs. Hemans … (London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1831). 2 vols.Corvey (CME 3-628-54798-9).

REFERRING TO THIS
ARTICLE
J. AARON.  Saxon, Think not All Is Won”: Felicia Hemans and
the Making of the Britons’, Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text
4 (May 2000). Online: Internet (date accessed): <http://www.cf.ac.uk/corvey/articles/cc04_n01.html>.
This article is a revised version of a paper
originally presented at the ‘Scenes of Writing, 1750–1850’ conference, held
20–23 July 1998, in Gregynog Hall, Wales.

CONTRIBUTOR
DETAILS
Jane Aaron was recently appointed Professor of English Literature at the University
of Glamorgan, after having been Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales,
Aberystwyth. Her research interests include the intersections between Anglo-Welsh
literature and the Romantic era. Publications include A View across the
Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales c.1850-1950 (Honno, 1998), Our
Sisters Land: The Changing Identities of Women in Wales (University
of Wales Press, 1994), and A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings
of Charles and Mary Lamb (Clarendon, 1991).